Why we have a local news discovery problem

The rapid and all consuming advance of the Internet has irrevocably changed the news; the way it is made, the way it is distributed and ultimately the way we consume it.

These changes have caused the demand for print media to dwindle, which in turn has led to many papers - both national and local - closing down. Closures have been felt the most by local communities, with a lack of printed media available in many areas. The most recent example being from November last year when Trinity Mirror announced the closure of seven regional newspapers, leaving many talented reporters without a job.

With this reality, James Harding, the BBC’s Director of News and Current Affairs recently posed the following question:

This deficit of local news coverage, to some extent, is being filled by a variety of website sources. Community organisations, local government, local places of interest, bloggers and hyper-local community websites (such websites are often run by people previously employed by regional newspapers) are all publishing news worthy articles to the web.

However, finding this local news isn’t easy as it sits across a number of different websites and with a multitude of sources, people don’t have the patience to navigate all of these different websites. People today expect convenience. It is for this reason that news aggregation services (such as Flipboard, Circa and Zite) have been operating for many years; to make it easy for people to filter out the vast amount of information that is published to the web.

Having recognised that none of the existing news aggregation services are location-driven, we began visualising how a mobile app that discovers local news by (the users current) location should function, and how we can go deeper to understand what really matters nearby - from there Bundle was born and our mission accepted, ‘Never miss out on the news that matters nearby’.

A generational change in the way we consume the news is already well under way. And for Bundle that consumption is at the core of our app, a location-driven news feed that consolidates the fragmented nature of local news.